Workers Earning Hourly Pay Are at Risk for Unfair Scheduling Abuses

And black and Latinx women are more at risk.

A 24-year-old, identified as E.A., just graduated from college last spring with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Maryland. She hopes to put her degree toward a full-time job with the federal government, but she hasn’t been able to find a job in that field yet. In the meantime, she’s working two part-time jobs, both at clothing retailers. She picked up her first gig back in college. Money was tight, and then it got tighter: Her mother got sick, and she had to start providing for herself and taking care of the apartment she shared with her mother. E.A. knew she had to get a job, but it took her more than a year to find one that would work with her schedule as a student.

She arranged her class schedule so that she’d be finished by 2 p.m. every day and could take the subway from Maryland into Washington, D.C., to work evening shifts. But her employer would often only tell her about her schedule two or three days in advance, making it tough to plan out time to study for tests or write essays — let alone spend time with her family or take a vacation. There was a binder at work where she could request specific days off for, say, a month out. But her manager wouldn’t always abide by it, meaning E.A. could never really count on having a day off.

“It’s hard enough to find a job, and it’s even harder to find a job that works around your schedule as a student,” E.A. tells Teen Vogue. “I was scared of saying something.”

E.A. is one of millions of Americans whose schedules just aren’t working. According to the Center for Popular Democracy, 38 million women work in hourly jobs. Scheduling challenges are especially common with these hourly jobs, says Julie Vogtman, senior counsel and director of Income Support Policy at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Unfair scheduling practices — ones that give employees limited control, or even knowledge, of their schedules in advance, sometimes called just-in-time scheduling — are indeed the norm for hourly workers: The NWLC reports that 40% of hourly workers receive their schedules less than a week in advance. They’re also likely to be paid less than salaried workers, Vogtman tells Teen Vogue. This short notice affects some people more than others: black and Latina women are more likely than white women to have hourly jobs. Teenagers also often find themselves in jobs that are paid hourly.

To be clear, this isn’t an issue of people not wanting to work — it’s about an imbalance of power where those least able to fight back are also required to sacrifice things like schedule flexibility.

Andrea Johnson, an expert on fair scheduling practices at NWLC, explains that there are a few reasons scheduling has gotten this bad this fast. Unions, she says, traditionally bargained for workers to have fair schedules. But they are now in decline and fewer people fall under union protections. At the same time that there were fewer and fewer ways for low-wage workers to bargain for better schedules, the 2008 recession led to more and more people in hourly retail and fast food jobs than ever before. On top of this, there’s also been a recent surge in employers’ use of online scheduling systems, which allow employers to try and shave off hours here and there when they know things will be slow, even if it comes at the expense of employees having regular schedules.

“It wreaks havoc on the lives of everybody,” Johnson tells Teen Vogue, ”but I think women are especially caught up in it.”

These trends mean that today, many hourly workers have to be on-call at all times, ready to work with next to no notice, according to the NWLC. But they also have to be ready to not work — their shifts may be cancelled on them without compensation at the last minute, often after they show up to work and their managers see that it’s a slow day and they’re not needed. That presents a particular challenge for students. Without advanced notice of their schedules for the semester, let alone the next week, hourly workers can face difficulty in signing up for college classes, even if they’re commuting or online.

In some ways, as Barbara Ehrenreich recently pointed out in The Atlantic, it’s more expensive to be poor — from spending money to get to work just to have your shift cancelled, to not being able to take on a second job because you don’t know the hours for your first. And for people who live paycheck to paycheck, unexpectedly losing out on four hours of work — and wages — can put life into a tailspin. For all the talk of the American dream and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, without a regular schedule it’s nearly impossible for low-wage workers to plan a way out of poverty.

Unfair scheduling practices trap many hourly workers. But beyond the fact that it’s economically beneficial for everyone when we make it easier for low-income people to make more money, there’s a moral argument, too: Shouldn’t all workers, regardless of whether they’re hourly or not, rich or poor, have some ability to plan time with their families and friends? To rest?

For Gina Schaeffer, an owner of 11 hardware stores in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia that collectively employ upward of 200 employees, the decision to implement fair scheduling practices was easy. “I’m not sure if we thought about it being a specific worker right when we started,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We just thought it was right.” She also notes, though, that doing things like posting schedules at least two weeks in advance, using an online scheduling system that employees can check from anywhere, and refusing to use on-call shifts — when employees must put their lives on hold in case they get called into work — are good for business. She says her employee turnover rates are lower than industry averages, meaning she saves on re-hiring and training costs, and that customer service is better because employees are happier. And, she notes, her workforce is an almost even split of men and women, while most hardware stores are dominated by men — a fact she attributes, at least partly, to her stores’ commitment to fair schedules.

Across the country, cities and states are starting to recognize the need for a better balance in the power of scheduling between employers and employees. In states’ 2015–2016 legislative sessions alone, 13 states and the District of Columbia considered comprehensive fair scheduling legislation, and three cities — Seattle and Emeryville and San Jose in California — all implemented ordinances. But until fair scheduling practices become the norm, young women like E.A. will, like an on-call shift, continue to live their lives on hold.